Growing Dreams - Don't Panic
- Callum Welsh
- Apr 29
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 30
The Fragile Reality Behind Organoid Intelligence (O.I.)
The future we are told, often arrives with a bang. In reality, it usually arrives twitching silently under fluorescent lights, while the myth of it explodes all around (Like a monkey infected with some sort of fictional rage virus).
In 1912, a fossilized skull was unearthed in Sussex, England. A strange combination of human skull and ape-like jaw. The find was hailed as the "missing link" being affectionately labeled the 'Piltdown Man' after the nearby village.
Definitive proof of human evolution.
The scientific community rejoiced, the public imagination caught fire and institutions even built entire evolutionary trees in attempt to support it.
It was of course a hoax, a carefully sculpted fraud that shaped decades of thinking before the truth finally dragged it down in 1953 (though there was much skepticism before this) when it was revealed that the 'Piltdown Man' was actually, a carefully crafted taxidermy of human skull fragments and an orangutan jaw.
We create. We project. We sell. We fear.
Sometimes out of ambition, sometimes out of genuine wonder. Sometimes, simply because our hopes move faster than our ability to verify them.
Today Organoid Intelligence, the art of growing 'simple' brain structures in a petri-dish and teaching them tasks like Pong, is gathering its own mythos. Headlines predicting Artificial Organic Intelligence, lab-grown sentience, the biological singularity.
But before this pyramid of cards rises too high - and before the inevitable reckoning when someone bumps the table - it's worth stepping back to look clearly at what’s actually happening here...
Growing Minds, Growing Myths
At the center of it all are brain organoids - tiny clumps of human neurons, coaxed from stem cells, living on multi-electrode arrays designed to detect and stimulate their electrical activity.
At Cortical Labs in Australia, scientists wired these neuron clusters into a basic computer interface and set them the task of learning to play Pong.
Not because Pong is a high intellectual achievement, but because it's a simple feedback problem:
Ball moves → Paddle moves → Good things happen if correct
By stimulating the neurons when their random firings resulted in success and subtly punishing them otherwise, the blobs began to show better performance.
Not thought. Not comprehension. Just pattern reinforcement.
It’s astonishing in its way however, deeply limited. This is not a conscious mind learning a game, it is a twitch responding to the rhythms of stimulation, no more conscious than a sunflower turning toward the sun.
Meanwhile composer Eduardo Reck Miranda pushed the boundaries in a different direction. At the Interdisciplinary Center for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) in Plymouth, he 're-programmed' his own white blood cells into neurons, interfacing them with a synthesizer.
The neurons fired chaotically, without intention or structure but, Miranda and his team built systems that interpreted these firings musically. The result was strange, eerie and beautiful.
The cells were not 'composing' music any more than a rainfall composes a river's song but, filtered through human perception with context it became music nonetheless.
It’s here, in this space between the twitch and the dream, that mythos starts to bloom.
The Twitch is Not the Thought
It’s important to be clear, to be rigorous, even in the face of wonder.
Sentience - the capacity for subjective experience, feeling, thought - is not present in these blobs.
They lack:
Integrated sensory feedback
Complex cortical layering
Emotional circuitry
Memory consolidation systems
What they have is activity, not awareness. Fire, not thought. Movement, not mind.
The distinction matters because history shows that once we see movement, we tend to presume intention. And from intention, we imagine dreams, desires, destinies - none of which exist in the petri-dish.
At least, not yet...
Building the Cultural Mythos
We've been building myths around intelligence (biological and artificial) for far longer than we've been able to meaningfully study it.
Philip K. Dick lived this unease long before silicon chips were powerful enough to warrant it. In the 1960s and 70s as computers still clattered along on punch cards, Dick asked the question that still haunts us:
"What if we build something so close to life that we forget where the difference lies?"
His novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' imagined a future where 'Replicants' (bio-engineered humans) blurred the line between living soul and manufactured thing. They felt, they feared, they desired and the humans, tasked with hunting them down, became less certain of their own humanity with each step.
'Blade Runner' Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, amplified these themes into one of the most visually enduring myths of the late 20th century; rain-slicked neon, battered androids dreaming of more life, battered humans wondering if they ever had it to begin with.
The technology imagined was far beyond anything that actually existed but, the emotional reality felt terrifyingly close.
Fast-forward to today and Black Mirror carries that same myth forward, wrapped in the cold steel of capitalism.
In the episode "Common People" we see a future where human consciousness itself becomes a service to be rented, downgraded and repackaged over and over again. Life not merely created artificially, but sold in bulk to the highest bidder. The horror isn't that the machines wake up. It's that we commodify them before they even do. These stories aren't warnings about rogue technology. They are warnings about ourselves, about how easily we mythologize, monetize, and manipulate every new life we touch.
When the Myth is Not Just Built, But Sold
Of course mythos doesn't always grow organically out of hope and fear. Sometimes, it’s cultivated...
In the fever of the twenty-tens as Silicon Valley raced to "disrupt" everything from taxis to hotels to groceries, Theranos rose to prominence by promising to "disrupt" medical testing.
A sleek device. A pinprick of blood. Hundreds of diagnostic tests, faster, cheaper, more accessible than ever before.
It fit perfectly into the mythos of the time;
Tech will save us.
The world will change overnight.
The future is now, and it is better.
Investors threw billions at it. Politicians endorsed it. The media hailed Elizabeth Holmes as the next Steve Jobs, the next Edison even! There was only one small problem, the technology didn’t work. Not even close...
Theranos wasn't a slightly premature dream. It was vapor. An empty box. A perfectly engineered myth riding on the emotional resonance of a society desperate to believe.
And it hurt people, deeply. False diagnoses, missed illnesses, shattered careers, wrecked trust in real medical innovation.
Hope became a business model. Mythos became a weapon.
And when it all collapsed, it wasn’t just Theranos that suffered, it was the entire idea that disruptive technology could be trusted without question.
Where That Leaves Us Now
Organoid Intelligence is not Theranos. There is real science happening... Real, messy, slow, difficult science.
But already, the headlines strain to crown it the next leap forward:
Lab-grown minds!
Neurons playing games!
Sentient dishes by 2030!
The myth moves faster than the twitching cells. It always does. The danger isn't that the blobs are dreaming of electric sheep. It’s that we are dreaming so loudly on their behalf that we might forget where reality ends and mythology begins. That’s where the real risk lies, not in the technology itself but, in how we shape the stories around it.
Hope drives exploration. Mythos fuels investment and wonder. But unchecked, myth can corrode trust, derail real progress, and leave the next wave of pioneers scrambling to clean up the wreckage after the dream collapses under it's own weight.
The question is not whether we will mythologize. We always will. The question is whether we can tell the difference between a real twitch and a projected dream, whether we can let wonder drive us without letting fantasy blind us.
The neurons in the dish are not thinking. Not yet. But we are. And that is both our burden and our chance.
Stay curious.
Stay skeptical.
Stay delighted that the future remains, for now, damp, twitching, messy, and miraculously real.
And above all,
Don't Panic...
Sources:
British Geological Survey. (n.d.). The Piltdown Man hoax. Retrieved from https://www.bgs.ac.uk
Cortical Labs. (2022). DishBrain: Synthetic biological intelligence learns to play Pong. Retrieved from https://www.corticallabs.com
Plymouth University. (n.d.). Professor Eduardo Reck Miranda. Retrieved from https://www.plymouth.ac.uk
Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday.
Scott, R. (Director). (1982). Blade Runner [Film]. Warner Bros.
Brooker, C. (Writer). (2023). Black Mirror: Common People [TV episode]. In Black Mirror, Netflix.
Carreyrou, J. (2018). Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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